Stolen Pleasures (21 page)

It makes no difference, your name on a gold cup or on the Social Security records or on any records. Today I remembered that my name is on the gold cup in a glass cupboard at the Eastside High School in Los Angeles. I was surprised to remember that I was valedictorian of my class. It was nice at the time in a strained way, I think I looked like a scarecrow in a peach-color lace dress and
made a lot of promises for the class about what we were going to accomplish. It makes no difference, your name. Who knows who you were?

On the other hand it isn't his fault. It's the years' fault. The years are too much for me, the years are full of the prevailing public opinion, and what's a few days of coming up Divine from the basement of a bookstore? He moved in upstairs at the end of the years and I blamed everything on him because an excuse was what I needed, a match to set fire to the pile of years in my chest. I hate to think that prevailing opinion wasn't as prevailing as I thought it was. Come to think of it, I remember seeing lots of homely women with children around their skirts and lots of old women laughing. But that little doubt makes me feel like asking somebody for food and how do you do that without shame?

The ceiling can't bear the weight of his footsteps. The ceiling is about to fall in. All I feel is the fall of the ceiling about to fall.

T
HE IMMENSITY OF light—the glare from the winter sky and the reflected glare from the ocean—shocked her asleep at noon, at two o'clock, at any hour of the day. She had always resisted sleep in the day except when she was sick and when, after loving, she had fallen asleep with a lover; but this sleep was an edict as from a healer more powerful than her own self, the self that had lost for a time the sense of how to heal itself in its own way.

The house where she lay, upstairs, on a rug, on a couch, on the bed, was a brown-shingled, two-story house trusted to pilings sunk deep into the sand. At high tide the water came sweeping in under the house, exposing more length of the upright logs, and the constant sound of the waves worked along with the light to make her sleep. The small noises, the low voices from downstairs where the owner of the house lived—a German woman, with her ninety-sixyear-old mother—did not disturb her sleep; only the sharp sounds woke her, the barking of the three little dogs whenever a visitor
stepped onto the porch or they fussed among themselves over a preferred place.

The ocean had been her first sight of the vastness of the earth when she was a child in a beach town down near the border, and she had come to the ocean again, to this town north of San Francisco, to find again that vastness, now when she was in dire need of release from constrictions on the mind, which was such easy prey to all things that kept it small and afraid. The sleep was like basking in light, and after three days of it she came awake.

Out on her small, high porch, she threw bits of bread into the air, and the seagulls came swooping in. Close, hovering, their spread wings and tails pure white and translucent in the light, they were unfamiliar, nameless creatures. When there was no more bread and they returned to the sand, they became again familiar.

The old mother, wrapped in a large, richly blue woolen shawl, sat on a sofa in the front room, and her blue, long-lidded eyes appeared unseeing. A storm, rising up over the horizon at noon, was sweeping tatters of fog before it, and the room was dark one moment and bright again the next. The old woman seemed unaware of this play of light and shadow over her. She spoke only in German and only to her daughter. Once, when the dogs were dozing, she spoke a few words to the room, and Marie, on the other old sofa, facing the mother, a low table between them, called to the daughter who was in the little kitchen, “Is she speaking to me?”

“She spoke to Paulie. He's her favorite.”

The darts of light disappeared again from the glasses and bottles in the room, and the colors in the stained glass window facing the ocean, colors that only a minute before were cast on the old
woman's face, went dark. The old mother's face was from antiquity, and though her body was small and she could be half-carried to the sofa, her being was formidable with the past. And when Leni, the tall, robust, sixty-year-old daughter, sat down beside her mother—the daughter's smooth white hair drawn back from the brow, the mother's gray hair drawn back from the brow, both women's eyes the blue of an ideal sky—the visitor felt the same confusion in her heart, the same confrontation as on that night in Cologne, last summer. The night she and her lover came into their first city in Europe. They had boarded a bus at the airport in Luxembourg because the bus was sleek and empty and they were exhilarated and uncaring about which direction they took, and the bus went along a placid highway through forests to Cologne. Then, in the restaurant of the railway depot at midnight—so few patrons, so many empty tables, and a sad, pale, limping waiter in a shabby black jacket with a black satin stripe down the sleeves—she had felt past terrors lurking, as if what had happened in that country was happening still or was about to happen always.
You see our waiter,
he had said, his face steamed up by the food on his plate,
our limping waiter? He mistook strangers for the enemy, just like you're doing now.
But she was listening not to him but to her heart, to hear if it was willing to come along with her into that country.

Leni saw that the shawl was slipping and tucked it around her mother again. The mother wore quilted, padded long underwear of soft wool, fawn color. “They belonged to my brother, he hasn't worn them since his university days,” Leni said, her voice a young girl's. “When he came to visit us he looked at them with longing in his eyes.” The brother, a retired physician, older than Leni,
had returned to Europe and was living now in Switzerland, and his bones were feeling the cold, she said, no matter how much he danced with young women.

“Where did you go in Germany? Did you go to Heidelberg?” Leni asked. “We were born there, my brother and me. Up above the river is the Philosophers' Path, and there you walk and look down at the river and the old bridge, and below you on the slopes are the hill gardens. We lived up there. Up there are almond trees, they're the first to bloom. And wild peach trees, the wild ones have bigger blossoms than the cultivated ones. The seed falls into the earth and it grows. And old cherry trees, the one in our yard was two stories high. So many in bloom, people streamed up there to walk under them.”

The storm was on them, the house went dark in the heavy rain. She ran back up the stairs and into her rooms and watched the waves flinging ashore timbers and branches that had been rushed down the rivers weeks ago, in a storm all along the coast. South across the water she could see the silver shine of the city under rain, only the tip of it where the channel opened into the sea. And back in the classroom in the city, the rain pouring down the windows and voices barely heard, was any student wondering what had become of her, the lost professor? So many gentle sermons she had delivered on the necessity to clear one's mind of its landmines, of its traps for strangers who come near, those deathtraps that destroy the self as well as the stranger.
Let in some light,
she had told them.
Let in some light,
she pleaded with herself, alone.

She was kept awake all night by the rain striking the windows and the waves pounding all along the beach, up against every
house's flimsy barricade of rocks and dunes, and by the wild brilliance of the buoy lights tossed into the air by the black waters, and by the white shimmer that was the city, a net of lights afloat. Downstairs it must be dark, the only light that of the white waves reflected on the windowpanes. They were asleep, she was sure, familiar with storms on the edge of the ocean after twelve years in this rugged old house that had been their beach house in the years before, when they had lived in the city with Leni's brother. The old mother in her tiny bedroom on the safer side of the house, the daughter in her slightly larger room, and the three little dogs in their chosen places.

When it was light, the sky was revealed as clear. A flock of blackbirds pecked along the wet sand and flew up to the wires, preening themselves in a row. At noon she knocked again at the screen door. The dogs barked, Leni called out, and she went in.

The old woman was not on the sofa. The white dog with matted fur lay there; another dog was stirring somewhere, and the third was out on the sand, nosing the debris. Marie sat down in her usual place, and Leni came out from the mother's room, sat down on the other sofa, and took up her knitting.

“When I was a girl,” Marie began, and the listener must tell by the tremble in her voice that she had gone over this in the night, “we had a garden, too. My mother had orange trees and lemon trees and lots of rosebushes. One was as tall as the trees and its boughs hung down to the ground like a tent covered with roses. They were Jewish, my father and mother, refugees from Germany. They went to Cuba first and my father worked in a cigar factory where they hand-rolled the tobacco leaves, and then they came to California.”

It left her with an anguish in her breast, this confession, this chronicle told in one minute, this begging for release from somebody else's false image of you and of those dear to you.

No change in the woman's face, no pause of the knitting needles over the white sweater. “The earth is like a refugee camp,” the woman said. “So many are refugees. They don't save their lives, maybe, but they save their souls. My mother and me, we were on the last voyage of the
Bremen.
My brother was already over here. They were suspicious of my mother. We had birth records, church records, city hall records, but it didn't matter. When she was an infant she wasn't well, and her parents took her to her grandmother in the country, and when she came back to her parents, the neighbors thought she was not their child. That strange child, who was she and where did she come from? Isn't it terrible, how neighbors remember about a strange child, after years go by? On that last voyage there were one hundred, maybe one hundred and fifty passengers, and the ship could hold two thousand. Young men weren't allowed to leave Germany, so that was one reason it was empty. The few Jewish people never came to meals, they ate in their cabins. They were told to stay in there, I guess. So many empty tables in the dining salon, when always there were three serving times, and in the lounge—is it called?—many huge empty easy chairs. An English minister who was a passenger gave sermons, and I went to hear every one. He felt sorrow for the world. We all felt sorrow for the world on that empty big ship.”

She went along over the wide strip of wet sand and broken shells as far as the lagoon, a long way. Higher up on the sand lay a number of shore birds, dead from the storm. The sea was dazzling,
and the air so clear the little islands, miles away, were visible. She came back while the sun was forming into an oblong blazing jewel at the horizon.

The old mother still lay in her room, the next day at noon. Marie had never looked into that room, but from her usual place on the sofa she could see that it was darker than the other rooms and hardly more than an alcove.

“She dreams of garden parties,” Leni said. “I think it's one that keeps going on because the light is so beautiful, she says. She told me they had a banquet and I could have the leftovers. Last night I asked her, ‘Shall I turn off the light?' She said, ‘If it's all right with them.' She calls them
Herrschaften,
nobility. They're strangers. She asks me who this one is and who that one is, and I tell her I never met them. This morning she told me she saw the Kaiser in splendid clothes. No, it was the Lord, on second thought. Come and take a little look at her. She told me you were her girl friend in Freiburg, where she was born, and I didn't tell her you only got as far as Cologne.”

The little mother lay turned toward the wall, and the blankets over her were the color of her gray hair and pale skin. She took up no more space in the bed than a child. That was how her own mother had looked, though never as old as this one. No breath visible, the breath making not the slightest move under the covers. She had to back away from the sight, step back and cover her face to hide her grimace of sorrow over the old mother, over the memory of her own mother, dying.

She was wakened in the night by the strangers at the old mother's garden party. Visions of light and of luminous strangers in that
light, that was what the dying saw. She knew who they were, those strangers. They were the first of all the many strangers in your life, the ones there when you come out of the dark womb into the amazing light of earth, and never to be seen again in just that way until your last hours. She got up and walked about, barefoot, careful to make no sound that would intrude on that gathering of strangers in the little room, below.